Christian mental health experts have warned of an ‘astonishing’ rise in exorcisms, which ‘are now a booming industry in the UK’ according to an extensive new report on Christianity and mental health.

The report by the think-tank Theos describes ‘the burgeoning exorcism scene in the UK’ and says that ‘there is a danger of what one interviewee (a Christian psychiatrist) referred to as “Christian over-spiritualising”, by which he meant a tendency to ascribe anything and everything to spiritual causes when other medical ones may exist’.

The research instead suggests that mental health problems are medical and found that interviewees, including mental health chaplains, said that ‘in the vast majority of cases, the person in question was suffering with mental health issues which required psychiatric assistance’.